Argentina: Into the Abyss
In 1983, when Argentina held its first presidential election after seven years of military dictatorship, Raúl Alfonsín won with an optimistic slogan: “With democracy one eats, one is educated, one is cured”. He campaigned on moving past the junta’s reign of terror and restoring a welfare state. As the historian Jennifer Adair has argued, “the triple promise of political rights, physical safety and social well-being resonated in a country where many understood political terror and social deprivation to be bound up with one another”. 1 Over the next four decades Argentine governments of various ideologies have been judged in the light of this basic political agreement.… Seguir leyendo »